Open Source Blogging

I was recently browsing a comment thread on Lifehacker when one particular comment stood out to me:

Having kids is one of the most expensive poverty-inducing things you can do right now. - kalibar

I understand completely where kalibar is coming from with this comment. Many estimates with regards to the cost of raising a child put that figure at $200,000-$250,000 per child over their lifetime - and that’s a serious chunk of change.

When I read these estimates, however, and I look at our own spending, something doesn’t quite add up. To put it simply, we’re not … Continue Reading

Yesterday Mike Arrington took us off the rails and into the idiot land.

Listen, I’m as egotistical as the rest of them. I can say “follow me” along with the best of them. According to Loic Le Meur and Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, I have more authority than either of them because I have more followers on Twitter. Their words, not mine.

That idea is patently idiotic. We have been derailed from the promised land of smarter conversations on Twitter and have moved into the idiot land if that’s the way we think.

Even worse, my post yesterday about this got … Continue Reading

We had so much fun last year digging through the most popular articles on the blog and on Junta42, we wanted to do it again.

If content marketing was just starting to gain momentum last year, this year content marketing came into its own. Experts such as Seth Godin and Chris Brogan used the term, and Copyblogger Brian Clark regularly preaches the effectiveness of content … Continue Reading

OK, OK, I’m back to my blog thanks to popular demand.

One new service came up this morning that caught my eye: TechFuga.

As Louis Gray says, it’s like TechMeme and AllTop had a baby.

Now, whether or not you think this will prove successful (the jury is out, especially since TechMeme’s traffic has flatlined the past year) this points to something else: TechMeme hasn’t innovated and that lack of innovation is opening the door to competitors.

How has it not innovated? TechMeme has not acknowledged that there is something interesting going on … Continue Reading

The other day, Gary Shapiro, the guy who runs the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, dropped by and left a comment here. There were a few problems:

1. My commenting system caught his comment in moderation, so people didn’t see it posted until I took it out of moderation right now.
2. No one probably knows who Gary is and thinks he’s just another random commenter. Some comments ARE more important than others, but there’s really no way for me to point out Gary’s comment without doing a new blog post. Even then, if you happen only to see … Continue Reading

I’m working on a column for Fast Company Magazine about how microblogging companies like FriendFeed, Twitter, and Tumblr might make money. Here’s a little sneak peek based on a conversation I had today with Tumblr founder/CEO David Karp.

First, we didn’t focus on just advertising. Tumblr is joining media sharing sites Flickr and SmugMug into charging its users for stuff. People in the industry call that the “freemium” model. Give away one version, but charge for more features. Like what Flickr does. SmugMug goes further and just plain charges, but it’s worth it for … Continue Reading

I haven’t added either Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect yet, but they sure are taking over tons of blogs very quickly. TechCrunch and Gawker both turned on Facebook. So, I asked my readers on FriendFeed for whether they have turned on either and tons of results came in (good resource so you can see how everyday bloggers are using these technologies).

My blog here is hosted on WordPress.com, which makes it difficult to use widgets like these. I want to go back to Matt Mullenweg and ask him which ones he’s going to support (he founded Automattic, which makes … Continue Reading

I see Louis Gray has posted a list of his 10 top new web services for 2008.

I thought the list was missing a few of the best new services. So, I did two comparisons:

1. I asked Twitter for what services they liked the best that were new.
2. I compared all of Louis’ top services on Compete.com to my favorite new service, FriendFeed, to see how they measured up in traffic.

First, let’s compare in Compete. I included TechMeme in the charts as a baseline since that news service continues to be popular.

1. Twitter Search. Can’t compare here, but … Continue Reading

Another thing that Facebook just released is embeddable videos. TechCrunch covers that part.

But they missed how important a change in direction this is for Facebook.

This means that I can embed videos on blogs from Facebook and make those videos available to everyone.

Facebook now is a YouTube competitor and one that has a huge advantage: you know a LOT about the people who publish the videos on Facebook due to their strict rules and the social network — you can click on each person who uploaded video and you can see who their friends are, which is … Continue Reading

For the past few weeks I’ve been using PeopleBrowsr. Very cool. It’s the most significant thing to happen to social networking since FriendFeed came on the scene a year ago.

It was launched on FriendFeed and look at the reaction. That tells me that this is going to see significant growth because it delivers features that people need from Twitter, like grouping and ability to augment contacts, that Twitter and other social networks have been unable to deliver.

Here’s CEO Jodee Rich demoing it to me, I highly recommend you try this if you are a social networking freak … Continue Reading